Chip Mitchell

Based in our bureau near the border of Chicago’s Little Village and North Lawndale neighborhoods, Chip explores a wide range of topics, including immigration, low-wage industries, underground business, police policy, public health, transit, schools and housing.

Chip’s investigative and narrative reporting for WBEZ has earned about two dozen local and national honors. In 2013 and 2015, Chicago’s Society of Professional Journalists chapter gave him its annual award for “best reporter” in broadcast radio. He has also won two first-place National Headliner Awards, one for a 2014 series of exposés that led to a felony indictment of Chicago’s most celebrated police commander, another for a short 2013 documentary about a Chicago heroin supply chain through Mexico and Texas. Other honors have come from Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Scripps Howard Foundation, the Radio Television Digital News Association (Edward R. Murrow awards), Public Radio News Directors Incorporated, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Illinois Associated Press, the Chicago Headline Club and the Community Media Workshop (Studs Terkel award).

Before Chip joined WBEZ in 2006, his base for three years was Bogotá, the Colombian capital, where he focused on the participation of U.S. government and corporate entities in that country’s civil war. He reported from Colombia and several other Latin American countries for PRI’s The World, NPR’s Morning Edition, the BBC, the Dallas Morning News, the Christian Science Monitor, the Committee to Protect Journalists and others.

From 1995 to 2003, Chip focused on immigration and the U.S. role in Latin America as editor of Connection to the Americas, winner of the 2003 Utne Independent Press Award award for “general excellence” among newsletters nationwide. In 1995, the Milwaukee Press Club named a story he authored for Madison’s Isthmus the year’s best investigative report in Wisconsin. The story examined a fatal shooting by narcotics officers in a rural mobile-home park. In 1992, he co-founded two daily news shows broadcast ever since on Madison’s community radio station, WORT.

Chip was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He earned a B.A. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood with his partner and their daughter. He is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.